This afternoon, a friend of mine tweeted "Don't Click: "
I, being a naturally curious human being, proceeded to click the button and saw a page with another button that says "Don't Click"
I clicked on that button as well and then noticed that in my Twitter feed, I had in fact tweeted the same link even though I never consented to do so.
Huzzah! the first twitter social virus!
It seems mostly harmless, just perpetuating itself and breeding. You can check out the graph of its use here:
Here's how it works:
Continue readingI heart Bit.ly
We've been using Bit.ly a lot here at Sunlight Labs-- I've become somewhat of an evangelist of using it over many similar shortcut services. What gets me excited about bit.ly is the advanced tracking capabilities it has. Did you know....
- Bit.ly tracks friendfeed and twitter conversations?
- It tracks each individual click and tells you where they're coming from?
- It actually scrapes the page you link to with it and provides you with semantic data on the page?!
- All of this is completely "transparent?" You can view the stats of any bit.ly link
All you have to do is put /info/ in between bit.ly and the random characters it assigns to your link. So for instance, the bit.ly link to our recent "Redesigning the Government" post was http://bit.ly/LONF But if you just put that magic /info/ in it, you can see the stats: http://bit.ly/info/LONF
We've been using it to track Twitter's effectiveness at driving traffic to the Sunlight Labs website we're quite excited to see it using OpenCalais to scrape semantic data off the page as well. It is quite a unique blend of interesting information about something as simple as a link.
Also: I highly recommend the Firefox extension. It allows you to see some basic information about a bit.ly or other shortcutted link when you mouse-over it like how many clicks it has received and more importantly, what the full URL is.
Thanks Bit.ly!
Continue readingWeekly Lab Report 2009.04
More evidence of The Sunlight Foundation's pursuing its catalyst mission—using the power of the Internet to catalyze greater government openness and transparency—at the Sunlight Labs. Catalysts initiate reactions that precipitate the desired solution. Here's what happened this past week at Sunlight Labs...
Get Your Open Source On
If you know any Government folks, you might want to share with them CNET's Matt Assay report that open source mandates are coming to enterprises. Shouldn't Government be looking even harder into open source? We are.
What are you doing with the Stimulus?
Stimulus stimulus stimulus, all we're hearing about is the stimulus packages these days. Everyone in our field is figuring out different ways to parse bills, reports and other such things while we wait on Recovery.gov to launch. Whether it is Stimulus Watch, Read the Stimulus, or even Pew's Subsidy Scope (for which we are providing technical assistance), it seems like everybody is trying to parse and find data related to either bailouts or the stimulus packages.
We've started a wiki page to track what everybody is up to. Please add your own project here so people can check it out!
A note: to limit spam on our wiki, we require you to register before you can edit pages.
Continue readingRedesigning the Government: FEC
We got a lot of great comments and discussions happening from our redesign of USA.gov, so we thought we’d continue the series and call it “Redesigning the Government.” At Sunlight, we deal a lot with FEC information, both internally and through one of our grantees, OpenSecrets.org so we thought we’d take a look at prototyping some ways that the FEC could better disclose campaign finance information through the Web.
Continue readingCall Congress from Your Browser
"Using Yeas and Nays, a citizen can connect via phone to speak with her representatives, and the resulting shift keeps a record of the call located on the website that informed it." Uses Sunlight Labs API. Link
Continue readingTaking a look at the GOP Anywhere API
The Republicans in Congress have launched a new GOP.gov which includes an API. While a commendable effort it leaves a lot to be desired but could serve to pave a path towards an official congressional API.
Continue readingWeekly Lab Report 2009.03
It was a quiet (code) week in Sunlight Labs, more a week of conversations and information sharing than production. The fact practitioners can so easily move between "producing" and "knowledge sharing" is one of the things I like about the Web and its mix of blogs and wikis and email lists and twitter, etc. Here's what happened this past week at Sunlight Labs...
Continue readingGovernment Hackers – Know These Challenges
The value proposition of Web 2.0 changing government is no longer debated. But your govt hacker street cred depends on understanding the real challenge is interoperability with policies and rules created for a federal government whose founders embraced the disruptive technology of their time, the printing press.
The following links are your briefing book...
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